As the nights get cold
by Crimson Falcons
Summary: Post-war. So sacrifice yourself, and let me have what's left.


**I'm really excited for this new one.**

**This is my response to Naruto: The Last. And the whole series really.**

**Just excuse the mistakes I might have missed.**

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><p><strong>1.<strong>

**Chalk outline**

She remembers the feel of him under her fingertips, the way his warmth penetrated through her clothes and burned her skin. Blue eyes, vast as oceans and endless like the sky, always clouded, shrouded under a veil- he was always thinking, she laments, about what he wasn't able to accomplish.

His apartment is the same he left it- crumpled, messy. The air is stale, but not because of the spoilt food. Kakashi opens the windows and lets the light touch the carpet for the first time in weeks. It reminds her of how his skin glowed under the sun, eyes crinkling at the corners as he crunched on the dry grass of the training grounds, shadows playing on his face. His black jacket flying in the air. Blonde hair spiked beyond belief, smiling uninhibited. But his eyes- God, his eyes- how could she not have seen it? The way they would glaze over as he remembered the ghosts he had seen, the burdens he had to shoulder alone.

Ten years is a long time to chase a mirage. She should know.

They clean up as much as they can without disturbing the sanctity of this tomb. When they leave, she runs her eyes over it one more time, remembering, in remorse. The silent walls stare back as her, unabashed, maybe slightly accusing. This is an echo of what could have been something monumental, she thinks, closing the door after her. Something epic. Kakashi locks it, the keys dangling in his hands, the green frog seemingly frowning along with them. Outside, Konoha seeps into darkness, slowly and then all at once. The Hokage mountain looms over them, the faces etched in stone looking more so desolate under the harsh glares of the spotlights.

She ends up finding herself sitting on the bench that started it all.

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><p>Sometimes she thinks she hates what she has become. Her black high collared shirt makes her feel claustrophobic in her own skin, and as she runs her fingers over her arm guards, the loneliness floods into her system automatically. Buts she's tired, worn out and soaked and weary, and she just wants it all to be quiet again.<p>

Kakashi sits behind his desk, charcoal eyes lazily roaming over the mission reports that have been piling on his worktop for weeks. She fingers the tips of her hair.

"I think I need a haircut," she traces the side of the kunia absentmindedly, but it brings an onslaught of memories coloured in purple light and surrounded by darkness that dares one to cross over. Nostalgia, she thinks, retiring the senbons back in her nin pack, is a sad thing to behold. Still, it's a considerable option. She'd done it before, once.

Kakashi gives her a fleeting look, those scarecrow eyes moving leisurely at their own slow pace. She bites the inside of her cheek to prevent herself from saying further; silence always made her feel edgy. Caged.

And that's when she feels it. Something cold mixed with electricity, a splash of crackling darkness, almost overflowing, oozing power. She feels it in her chest, a tightness she can't explain, like someone had reached a hand inside and grabbed a hold of her heart, decaying nails digging in; it hurts. It shouldn't. She knows it shouldn't.

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><p>They land silently, their feet barely touching the ground they're trudging through. The walls feel smaller somehow, now that he knows how to jump over them. Up ahead, the hokage tower lays awake among a city bathed in silence, a beacon to lost souls and all the village sought to represent.<p>

The door is open for them as they reach the third floor. Inside stand the foundations of his past and all the memories he wishes to sometimes forget.

She's the first one he notices, and it's something he thinks he's driven by instinct and not habit. Always so bright, now she stands straight, green eyes half lidded and glowing under the light of the moon- they look feral, almost catlike. The anbu tattoo on her arm is scorning, swirls of black ink on alabaster skin. She's progressed without him to back her up, he comes to realise, but it shouldn't leave a bad taste in his mouth.

Kakashi smiles at him, eyes crinkling at the corners as they always do, like as if he knows a joke no one is privy to. Maybe he caught him staring.

"Nice to see you again, Sasuke."

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><p>She begins to wonder how they all ended up here, submerged in all the secrets that choke the air out of their lungs and binds them, body and soul. Politics is an ugly game, and they've always somehow been in the middle of it, thinking they could rewrite their fate, hoping to mold their future into something better. Brighter.<p>

His team stands behind him, arms still and muscles tight. No one moves to remove their cloaks. She lets her eyes roam to the orange haired giant at the very back who stands blocking the door. Something about him irks her senses, and the muscles around her eyes go stiff as she realizes what.

His biology is all wrong, his hormones out of balance, a ticking time bomb in bronze skin, waiting to explode. The cursed seal peaks at her from under the collar of his shirt, three black commas inked on a cable knot neck which is thicker than her fists, taunting her. She slowly reaches for her holster, gaze trained on the man who almost reaches the ceiling with his intimidating height, eyes narrowing an inch.

"At ease, Sakura," Kakashi doesn't need to look back at her to know, and she stiffens for the tiniest moment where her thoughts run wild and the shinobi within her screams to arm herself lest she wants to die here before-

Loosening her fists, she straightens her spine, and folds her arm behind her back. She can feel Sasuke's eyes on her, scrutinizing and hardly curious, perhaps slightly mocking. Maybe he still perceives her as the little girl he abandoned so many years ago who could hardly hold her tear ducts in hold.

The thought makes her angry before she can tell herself to stop caring. Meeting his gaze, she holds it, unflinching, and feels a sliver of satisfaction at the fact that he's the first to look away.

"I've covered Rain. He hasn't been there."

They'd expected as much, but still, that doesn't stop the helplessness that slams into her. Chewing on her lips, she turns her back and stares out the window, frustrated- a dark city looks back at her, drugged in sleep induced haziness and opacity. It takes her a moment to notice how wet her eyes have become and she mentally screams at the tears to seep back to where they came from. Not that they listen to her anyway.

The chair creaks as Kakashi leans back and massages his forehead with his fingers. Already he can feel the beginning of a massive headache developing, one which will fry his nerves and make him want to gauge his own eyes out. But that doesn't compare to the worry that settles in the pits of his stomach, heavy as lead and just as poisonous; it has been three weeks since the last messenger bird came in, three weeks since the world last heard from the ninth squad before they vanished off the surface of the world, leaving no trace, like as of they'd been whisked off by a ghost ferry that came sweeping in and made a mad dash with the bodies. The thought could have been amusing if he had any other explanation.

"We'll discuss this later in the morning," Kakashi says, his voice gruff with fatigue.

Taking her mask from the mahogany desk that is littered with scrolls and maps, Sakura nods in his direction and aims the keys for Sasuke's face. He catches them with ease.

"You know where to go," the porcelain mask reminds her of animal spirits and millennium long lives spent in cages. She feels like as if she can't breathe in the same air as him anymore, and it hurts her to realise that she might never be able to again, even if for Naruto. Their history sickens her, all those bad decisions, one after the other, all that bad blood, on her hands, crimson and sticky even after half a decade for distance.

She jumps out from the window, pink hair spiking in her wake, a silhouette against the moon, and lands on her feet without making a sound. Under the animal mask, her tears defy her and fall.

Her apartment is dark when she enters. She moves past the living room and places her mask on the kitchen counter, its white surface gleaming under the light of the moon. The silence echoes around her, desolate, lonely. She rubs the heel of her palms against her wet eyes till her cheeks burn and everything she sees is a watery blur.

It takes her a while to stop and drag her feet to bed.

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><p>Sasuke watches them unpack. Specks of dust dance under the light of the moon; tiny particles trapped in motion, drifting through air in endless somersaults. They remind him of sandy spindles and abandoned water wheels in the valleys of the northern mountains.<p>

Karin drags her bag to one of the room and slams the door, its sound reverberating in the previously empty apartment- his apartment, where he'd spent years grinding himself to be better, stronger, faster, feels strange to his senses, and maybe it felt the same way about him too.

He wouldn't expect it not to.

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><p>Walking over roofs, she glances at the city below. Her feet are silent when she moves, barely making a creak over the ceramic tiles and wooden sheets that fall on extended beams and posts that reach out of the earth like blackened digits, a mass of dark metal on white ground; it all reminds her of team 7, of wind swept hair inky black like the starless sky on a thundering night, standing stark on alabaster skin over marble features; of bones set in stone and spiked blonde hair a halo charged by the sun's light. They were both reflections of the other, two souls on both sides of the mirror.<p>

Her nails chip on her metal arm guards as she probes her mind to find where she was meant to fit in; between an angry vigilante, a hyperactive ball of fire and the white flash, there was no space for her to expand, to breathe. They were choking her all on their own, and they never even knew.

With a rueful smile twisted on her lips, she crouches down to the centre beam and traces her fingers on the words etched in wood and burns them to her skin.

From her position on the street Ino frowns up at her, feet digging into dirt that fans her eyes and hair. Sakura pulls her mask and teleports herself out of there.

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><p>"Sakura."<p>

She stops, feet planted firmly on the wooden floor, black sandals gleaming in the anemic morning light that penetrates through the blinds like bars of dull gold. Looking over her shoulder, she blinks up at him.

"Sasuke," her voice is curious, eyes narrowed around the corners where her lashes converge and point upwards in a mesh of pink and black tangles; they remind him of the cats that used to haunt the streets of the Uchiha district in the past.

He frowns as the memories flood back into him and forces himself to focus on the green pigment of her eyes.

"Your team isn't with you," she makes the motion of looking at the hallway behind him before twirling on her feet. "This way."

Sasuke stares at her retreating back, at the tell-tale white vest and black pants and wonders if he should be relieved or concerned.

Releasing a silent breath, he walks behind her to the large window on the second floor of the Hokage tower and follows her out of it as she leaps over roof tops like a panther, her movements oiled slick and smooth. Her fingers slide over the surface of the supporting beam in a haze of pale skin and blue light, and he has to stop himself from bringing the crimson to his eyes to confirm that's she's not just another ghost drifting through the crowds.

They move through the city to his apartment. She takes the keys out her pockets and leads them inside, roving her eyes across the pale walls and empty bed in reverie, like as if she's stuck some place no one else can go.

He activates his bloodline.

A minute passes. The sound of her barely-there breaths keep him grounded.

"Nothing."

She jerks a nod at him, pressing her lips in a thin line as her eyes narrow. Sasuke looks away.

There's something peculiar about the silence that floods the space around them like oxygen, and as she moves to open the window, Sasuke feels something choking his windpipe- he feels like a trespasser in this tomb, and the walls seem to want him out and away. Not that he doesn't share the same sentiment.

"Kiba and Akamaru have swept this place more than a dozen times probably," her voice wafts over to him, a whisper above the sound of the busting city below them, "but I just-" She breaks off, lips pulled into her mouth and between her teeth in a struggle. He stares at her.

"I just wanted to be sure they hadn't missed anything." A resigned exhale, and she's up again, her face carefully crafted to indifference, a mask under her real mask; it makes him angry. Lips pulled down to a frown, so close to falling off to oblivion, he just wants to leave again, and never come back. Not if he can help it. But there are things to sort, and promises to keep, and Sasuke thinks he owes them that much.

"We'll find him," he doesn't know why he says it, or says anything at all, and he knows that it's the same thing she's wondering now as she stands, with her back to him and the past they once shared. But she just blinks at him over her shoulder and he finds it increasingly irritating and wishes he hadn't opened his mouth at all.

A second passes. His fingers itch to fist themselves into the dirt of his destroyed home.

Sakura hums. He tries to hold in a groan and pinches the bridge of his nose instead.

At the hokage tower, Kakashi waits for his students to come back to him again.

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><p><strong>Reviews are essential.<strong>


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